The Tempering Part 47

"All he needed was a little overseein'," retorted Saul blandly. "That's why I'm here now. I've got to lay low for a while because there's still the little matter of an indictment outstandin' but the same man stands in your light and mine--we ought to be able to do some business together."

"Things have changed a mighty heap," demurred Tom uneasily, but Saul laughed.

"Let's change them back, then," he responded.

The plotting of a murder is erroneously presumed by the unpracticed to be an affair of hushed voices and deeply closeted conspirators. Between these two craftsmen it was discussed in the calm hard-headedness of severe practicality. To Saul, who had been long an absentee, Tom Carr's intimate familiarity with current conditions proved a bureau of vital statistics. To Tom, who saw in Boone a dangerous trouble-maker and who yet hesitated to make a feud-killing of the matter, the hand of a volunteer was welcome, and so, as they talked, a community of interests developed. Tom was to provide Saul with an inconspicuous refuge, and Saul was to do the rest. A few others whose active partic.i.p.ation was needed were to be taken into confidence, but the secret was to be held in close-guarded circle.

It is said that no other bitterness can be so saturated as that of the apostate, and Saul brought into Tom's presence one day a boyish fellow whose blood was Gregory blood but whose one strong emotion seemed to be hatred of his own breed. He had been selected by the intriguer as the man to take in hand and carry to success the a.s.sa.s.sination of Boone Wellver.

Into Tom's office slouched "Little" Jim Bartleton by the front way, and into it, by back stairs, came Saul at the same time.

Until a short time back no one had thought much about Little Jim. He had not been a positive personality until recently, when he had taken to drink and developed a mean streak. Always he had been fearless, but that elicited no comment in a land where cowards are few. His most recent friends.h.i.+ps had all been among the Carrs, and no insult to his own people had been uttered in his hearing which he had not capped with one more scathing.

Just where his grievance lay had been his own secret. For Saul's purpose, it sufficed that it existed and was dominant.

"Son," questioned Tom Carr in his suave voice, "I see plenty of reasons why a feller should disgust Boone Wellver, but he's yore kin. Why does ye hate him so?"

The answer came, prefaced with a string of oaths:

"I hain't nuver named this hyar ter nairy man afore now, but I aimed ter wed an', ter git me money enough, I sot me up a small still-house nigh ter whar he dwells at."

Spurts of hatred shot out of the speaker's dark eyes; eyes which in kindlier moods were lighted by intelligence.

"Ef I'd been left alone I could of got me enough money ter do what I wanted ter do ... ther gal was ready ter hev me. But, d.a.m.n his law-an'-order, hypocritical piety! he hed ter nose out my still an' warn me thet without I quit he'd tip me off ter ther revenuer."

"Some folks," put in Tom, "moutn't even hev warned ye."

"Thet's jest ther p'int," panted the boy. "He told ther revenuer fust-off an' then warned me atterwards. Ef hit hedn't of been fer a right gay piece of luck, ther raiders would of come afore I got ther still hid away--an' I'd be sulterin' in jail right now. I've done swore ter kill him."

"An' ther gal, son," prompted Tom gently.

The black face went even blacker.

"I reckon," he said savagely, "she don't aim ter wait fer me no longer.

I owes thet ter Boone Wellver, too."

"An' so ye're willin'--?"

"Plumb willin' an' anxious! I've done held my counsel. He don't suspicion how I feels.... I knows every path an' by-way over thar. I knows every step he takes when he's at home. Thar hain't no fas.h.i.+on I could fail."

"An' ye knows, too, how ter keep yore mouth shut?"

"I hain't nuver told nuthin' yit."

The two conspirators looked at each other and nodded. Here was an agent who could move without suspicion and act out of his own ardour of hatred. Decidedly he was a discovery.

So the hireling was instructed and given a leave of absence to go and "set up with ther gal in Leslie County." But he did not go to Leslie County. He went, instead, by a roundabout road to the state capital, and one evening knocked on the door of Boone Wellver's hotel room.

When the messenger arrived, Boone was sitting alone with a brooding face, while in his hand he held a telegram which had fallen like an unwarned bolt on his lascerated soreness of spirit.

Two hours ago he had received and read it. In it Victor McCalloway had said: "Deeply regret not seeing you for farewell. Called suddenly for indefinite absence. Luck and prosperity to you always."

Luck and prosperity! Boone just now was hoping at best to fend off despair and a total disintegration of a hard-built structure of ideals.

To McCalloway his thoughts had turned for the succour of a steadying calm--and that one ally was no longer in reach. Boone had read the words with a numbed heart, for now out of the confusion of tempest-smother that beat about him he had lost even the solace of the bell-buoy's strong note.

This misfortune, be a.s.sured himself, at least exhausted the possibilities of perverse circ.u.mstance to hurt him. Misfortune's box of tricks were empty now!

Tonight Colonel Wallifarro was entertaining at dinner. Anne would be smiling as they congratulated her. A little while ago he had been at just such a dinner, marvelling greatly at the good fortune that had brought to him such progress. Now it stood for the emptiness of effort.

Tonight he wanted the hills--not calm and star-lit, but rocking to hurricane fury and thundering with flood. No voice of all their voices could be too wild or ruthless for his temper.

Boone was in a dangerous mood. He sat there with no eye to censor him, and more than once he winced, biting back an outcry. His strongly thewed shoulders heaved and flinched with thoughts that fell on quivering brain-nerves like the merciless las.h.i.+ng of an invisible scourge. He tried to a.n.a.lyze himself and his relation to affairs outside himself, but his psychological attuning was pitched only to such an agony as cries for outlet. Everything that he was, he bitterly reflected, was a summary of acquired ethics designed to bury and hide his natural heritages. He was a tamed and performing wild animal, and just now the only a.s.suagement that tempted him was the instinct to be wild again--to lash out and punish some one for his hurting.

The star that had led him had gone out, but one could not punish a star.

Even in his frenzied wretchedness he could not even want to punish his star.

But her world--to which he had climbed with a dominant ambition--that was different. That smugly superior world had betrayed him.

The young features hardened, and the eyes kindled into the lightning-play that leads men, but it was such a leaders.h.i.+p as animates the chief who dances around the war fires and no longer of him who smokes the pipe of sane counsel.

Just now it would take little to send the pedestal of acquired thought down in ruin. Just now an enemy would not have been safe within the reach of his blow.

Yet with a pale, expiring flicker, struggling through darkness, there remained a half realization that this was all a delirium which he must combat and overcome.

"I reckon," he said aloud, with that self-pity which is not good for a man, "I've been as deep down in h.e.l.l today as a man can go." Then he started as a knock came on his door, and into the room stepped Jim Bartleton of Marlin Town.

"Saul Fulton's done come back," he announced curtly, "an' Tom Carr's done tuck him in. I'm one of the men thet's been hired ter kill ye."

Of course, the tale of the still and the threatened raid was of a piece with all of Jim Bartleton's hatred; of a piece, too, with his seeming degeneration. Boone Wellver, facing the animosities of enemies who fought with ancient guile, had sought to meet that condition. "Little"

Jim was one of several, wholly faithful to him, who had undertaken to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the conspirators.

The same Commonwealth's attorney who had prosecuted Asa Gregory had gone to his own house for dinner, and now he sat before his library fire in slippers and faded smoking jacket. On the floor near him lay an afternoon paper, but the day's chief news he had garnered more directly by personal contact. Over there in the a.s.sembly was being waged a battle which interested him deeply. So inured had he become to high tides of political struggle that it did not occur to him to reflect upon the frequency with which, in his native State, bitter campaign followed upon bitter campaign. A Democrat and a Republican were at grips for the United States senators.h.i.+p. Each of them had been a governor of Kentucky and the legislature, where senators were still made, hung in grimly unyielding deadlock. All that afternoon until its adjournment the lawyer had sat in the visitors' gallery of the house or laboured in the lobby.

Now he sought brief relaxation after his own fas.h.i.+on. He sat upright in his armchair with a clarionet pressed to his lips and his cheeks ballooned, playing "Trouble in the Land."

The soloist at length took the instrument from his pursed lips and wiped the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, and as he did so the negro man who was both bodyservant and butler opened the door of the room.

"Thar's a gentleman done come ter see you, sah. He 'pears mighty urgent in his mind an' he wouldn't give me no name."

The officer, bethinking himself of political satellites who sometimes make a virtue of mystery, smiled as he directed: "Bring him in here, Tom. It's cold in the parlour."

Into the library came Boone, and stood silent until the negro had closed the door upon his exit; then he nodded curtly. There was an air of suppressed wildness in his eyes and a pallour under the bronze of his cheeks, upon which the attorney, as he offered a chair, made no comment.

"I'm here," announced the visitor with a brusque pointedness, "to give you information upon which it is your duty to act."

There was an unintended rasp of challenge in the manner, and under it the official's lips compressed themselves. Boone in his overwrought state felt that he must make haste, while he yet held himself in hand, and the attorney, believing his visitor to be ill, curbed his own temper.

"Let's have the information," he suggested. "Then I'll be in a better position to construe my own duty."